We are excited to announce that Route 53 DNS Failover now supports Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) endpoints. Starting today, you can use Route 53’s existing health checking and DNS failover features for applications running behind an ELB, to increase redundancy and availability for these apps.

With DNS Failover, Amazon Route 53 can help detect an outage of your website and redirect your end users to alternate locations where your application is operating properly. When you enable this feature, Route 53 uses health checks—regularly making Internet requests to your application’s endpoints from multiple locations around the world—to determine whether each endpoint of your application is up or down.

For ELB endpoints, Route 53 evaluates the health of the load balancer itself and the health of your application running on the EC2 instances behind it. If any part of the stack goes down, Route 53 detects the failure, routes traffic away from the load balancer, and directs traffic to other healthy ELB endpoints. Route 53 DNS Failover also supports EC2 endpoints as well as endpoints located in your own datacenter.

Using Route 53 DNS Failover, you can run your primary application simultaneously in multiple AWS regions around the world. Route 53 automatically removes from service any region where your application is unavailable. You can also take advantage of a simple backup site hosted on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), with Route 53 directing users to this backup site in the event that your application becomes unavailable.